


Gray Traces

by Ulqueleh (Ulquii)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, First Meetings, Happy Sheithversary!!, Introspection, M/M, POV Keith (Voltron), Scars, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, overwhelming feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 19:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19341010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ulquii/pseuds/Ulqueleh
Summary: Keith had always wondered where they came from, but the answers didn't come to him until then.





	Gray Traces

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!! 
> 
> I bring to you this thing here as a gift for Sheith Anniversary!
> 
> I really hope you all like it~

It started with a little gray line appearing in the curve of his right thumb, a slight and a not-really-there pain making him aware of it. He thought it wasn’t anything important, noticing that, as time passed, it disappeared until being almost invisible. He still could see it if he searched for it attentively and in the right light.

Then it was a splash on his left knee and on the base of the palm of his hands, near the inside of his wrist. It was really similar to the scratch he did to himself against the pavement when he fell from his skateboard, the scorch mark burning every time the fabric grazed it or the water passed over it when he showered. However, these splashes didn’t hurt as that, although he could feel them as injuries, somehow.

The splashes didn’t disappear like the line in his thumb did. Those scratches in his hand and knee stayed dyeing his skin with a gray that looked very akin to storm clouds. And when he mentioned them to his father while they were talking and remembering those injuries that they had made to themselves through life and the scars that had stayed, he noticed that his dad couldn’t see them.

He did point out the whitish marks and the creases in his skin that he made himself in moments of carelessness or fearlessness, telling him, for example, when he fell from the kitchen table, trying to catch a moth that fluttered in the ceiling, his arm falling in the edge of the bar and breaking the skin in a vertical line, long but superficial. Or when he almost had caused him a heart attack at accelerating his neglected, turned on motorcycle and crashing it in the entrance deck, an injury opening up in his leg against the wood and not being that serious as his panic had screamed.

His father couldn’t see them, nor even through the reflection of the mirror, so he had to accept to live with the doubt. A sigh escaped from his mouth every time a new gray trace appeared in his skin.

It was sometime after he was left alone that the marks started to concern him more than it had ever before.

One day he woke up in the darkness of dawn, his breaths coming out shallow filling up the silent emptiness of his apartment and a horrible but inexistent pain in several parts of his body making him flinch out of his sheets and get tangled more than escaping from them. When he tripped out of his mattress, he noted that his right arm, from the fingertips to way over his elbow, was painted in that faded gray, paling sickly his skin.

And looking up to the mirror, he felt his blood go cold at the line crossing over his nose, from cheek to cheek, with all the intention to divide his face in two.

Even though he had lived asking himself, and seconds later ignoring, where those marks came from, it wasn’t until that moment where his loneliness had overwhelmed him and the only reason he found for his own existence was the mere fact to continue surviving, that he determined to get an answer of its origins.

For weeks, seeing himself in the mirror and finding that mark in his face, already dissipated and not that startling in his reflection, brought him more relief than concern. Each day he woke up with the fear that his gray arm and all the little, crisscrossed lines in his torso and extremities had disappeared, leaving him with nothing more than sadness and misery that left his father’s death.

One day, unfairly, his heart almost stopped when the color came back to his right hand and most of his forearm, the only thing still marked like a barbed wire was just after his elbow. And the pain, more than outsider, felt empty.

The rest of the marks were still there, and it became an habit to trace them with his fingertips when his mind maundered through his life problems and the existential question concerning the gray parts in his body, as if establishing a physic contact with them could bring him closer to the answer he wanted.

And so, the line over his nose became his symbol of courage, granting him that fixation and strength to achieve what he wished for.

It was after healing from an assault attempt that somehow the answer came to him.

“Ex-cuse me.”

He looked up from the reportage of the magazine he took from the cafeteria basket. He wasn’t even one of those people whom read magazines, being more interested in scientific documents and text books, but the word ‘soulmate’ in the cover had grabbed his attention.

The person beside his for-one table was glaring at him with a very deep frown behind circular glasses, her hands resting in her hips in an aggressive stance. He had seen her before, he recognized her from his physics classes, but he had never been good with names.

“Yeah?”

He jumped away when she took another step to him, using in her favor the difference in heights provided by him being seated down and she standing up. If they were both standing, he could easily surpass her by a head.

“Could you, if you’re so kind,” she started with harsh tone, her nose scrunched in disgust that he was very used to, “stop doing that? You’re being a jerk.”

He blinked a few times, opening his mouth and moving his head slowly from side to side; afraid that making it in normal speed could enrage her more.

“What?”

He flinched when she got another step too close, this time making his chair scratch the floor.

“Stop. Doing. That,” she demanded through clenched teeth before throwing a gesture over her shoulder, “You’re bothering him!”

He followed up the movement of her hand to a group of people in the center of the cafeteria, encountering expressions really similar to the one the girl in front of him was shooting him, and his heart stumbled at the only one having a nervous and ashamed air.

It wasn’t because his hair was of the same white that the stars casted, or because he had the most beautiful gray eyes he had ever seen; it was the scar that crossed his face, over his nose, an identical copy as the gray line that he had in his own face.

His fingers twitched with the need to trace it, with the desire to stroke his and bring out a blush beneath it. He then noticed that his fingers were already positioned mid-caress over his nose, ever since he had read in the magazine about connections through the soul and destined encounters, minutes before the girl had come to him to defend that man from the apparently rude stranger that couldn’t keep himself from emphasizing the startling scar someone had in their face.

His eyes inevitably fell to the prosthesis that had as his right arm, most of it hidden beneath the sleeve of his shirt, and he heard the papers in his hands crush in his fist, remembering the gray color and the sensation that he had for several months before returning to normal and almost causing him a heart attack.

He looked up to the stranger’s eyes, noting how realization washed down his expression while observing carefully the right side of his face, eternally marked by the scar crossing his cheek, and how something similar to a nervous tick made him reach over to his own jaw with his prosthetic hand, his knuckles tracing vaguely the width of the scar he had in his skin.

A few years ago, it had passed through his mind that the gray traces in his body existed because another person was the one that was suffering those injuries, and he had discard it immediately because it horrified him thinking that someone else was painting his body with scars of their own, that his skin was marked up by someone else’s pain, that someone was about to die and he couldn’t do anything more than just ask why those marks appeared.

He remembers, even, asking himself, in the confusion of the meds that the hospital gave him, if the scar that will be in the side of his face forever had arrived to the skin of someone else, painting it in a color he ignored and causing a feeling that he will never know of.

But now he knows.

And it was mostly surprise.

That man, too gorgeous to be true, wasn’t touching his cheek as other unpleasant people had with the left side of their faces when they have seen him face to face. He was touching it as if the scar was on his own skin and not on the skin of some stranger he saw in the cafeteria, as if he was more used to seeing it day to day in front of the mirror and not in another person face.

His expression full of wonder suddenly went to one with a saved-up constant concern, as if he was aware of all the scars he had made in himself in moments of danger, fearlessness and stupidity.

And then he knew: that person knew him better that any other person in that world.

He jumped up from his seat when his understanding reached the knowledge, and ran up to escape in an attempt to escape that overwhelming feeling that was filling his chest.

“Wait…!”


End file.
